September 29, 2010

A Series of Flights, Fancies, and Facts

e at the Society – and certainly our readership – stood and cheered upon learning of the following commercial intercourse: a publishing contract has been extended to a certain incomparable and inimitable artist (or in the plain – nay – Seussian words of the trade publications: Snooki sells a book). When the thick and, no doubt, illuminated tome appears on the center shelves of the ever-rarer local bookseller, we at the Society are certain to pant after the elegant and peaceful writings of her expert quill, as the heart panteth for lemon blossoms.

Her words shall fall upon our ears with a peculiar yet indescribable charm, like the gentle wave-driven sands as they grate against and polish the refuse of the previous morning’s bacchanalia into sea glass and oblong, reservoir-tipped balloons for the children to scavange; or the soft, innocent, and well-meaning kisses of a feral canine that has – immediately precedent – successfully orally expressed its posterior scent glands.

Temple at Olympia (Restored)

Learn and remember, gentle reader, the name Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizzi. Where once it seemed impossible to conceive of how the so-called Titans could be surpassed, equaled, even approached in the celestial literary stadion; today, the Society has every confidence that the industry’s Jovian gravitational pull toward ethereal fiction for the minor celebrity will eclipse the once decided superiority of all previous generations. To paraphrase another Italian of transcendent mental superiority, Vizzini:

Never has there been a more apt moment to give requiem – by parting quotation – to those that came before, for when the population collectively skims this newly-pressed Polizzi-rature, indubitably, it will – in one motion – cast aside and forget the deformed prose dwarfs of the last century:

. . . if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it’d die of remorse on the third.

– Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Yet let us speak not of talent; for it is a quality which fades as quickly as the delicate, raw sienna coating of simulated exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Indeed, talent protrudes as the hirsute, superfluous papilla on the chest of America: a thing of no utility, and one from which the eyes are invariably averted.

(The Society is acutely aware that much of its own writing is not immediately ready for the great wide world, and so we continue the difficult work of honing that skill to a keen edge.)

Thus Time brings all things, one by one, to sight

And Skill evolves them into perfect light

− Lucretius

And thus too the Society proposes a toast: To this Pyrrhic victory for brick-and-mortar publishing! Whose integrity of purpose is yet more transparent and respected the higher it ascends the ladder scaled by the likes of those visionary generators of the summer reality television.